For a number of reasons, the use of credit cards, such as MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express, have become many people's primary means for satisfying financial obligations. Currently, when a user is not online, the user generally receives a receipt upon the completion of a credit card transaction which is a physical print out including various transaction data. The transaction data provided on a traditional receipt is generally limited to the date of the transaction, the amount of the transaction, credit card number, and the payee or merchant. For purposes of this application, a merchant is an entity with an online presence that provides goods or services and receives valuable consideration.
In order to ensure that the merchants properly billed the credit card holder, or user for the purposes of this application, many users retain the receipt. A number of computer based financial management systems have been developed having at least a partial purpose of simplifying the method of keeping track of various financial information, such as Intuit's Quicken™ and Microsoft Money™. Among other features, these applications enable a user to enter transaction data, for the purposes of monitoring spending, ensuring accurate charges by merchants, tracking accounts payable, and other reasons.
With certain credit cards, the transaction data provided by the merchant can be compared to the transaction data entered by the user automatically in a function often called reconciling. In Quicken™, for example, a user can download credit card charges from a number of member banks, and accept those transactions that accurately represent the user's purchases. This system saves the user time in data entry and reduces the likelihood of data entry errors. However, the present financial management systems provide neither a mechanism for creating reminders for financial transactions consummated online, nor for directly entering information associated with online transactions. Furthermore, the present monitoring systems store data only about the total transaction amount, but fail to store information about the particular items purchased and the costs of the particular items.
These and other drawbacks exist with current systems.